The purpose of this site is to promote construction of a monorail system in the Seattle area.

Why Monorail?

A monorail is not just a fun ride at Disneyland. Larger versions are often better than light rail for urban rapid transit. Click here for details.

We are not the Seattle Center Monorail, which has the domain name seattlemonorail.com, that’s .com, NOT .org!.
If you were trying to reach the Seattle Center Monorail, click here. The Seattle Center Monorail is the one built during the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair and still operates for about one mile from Westlake Center to the Seattle Center.

The Seattle Center Monorail needs to expand capacity and convenience to encourage more ridership to Key Arena and the Seattle Center in general, and also to better serve the Lower Queen Anne neighborhood.

There is a plan to build a new arena for NBA basketball in the Sodo district of Seattle, but fears of traffic interfering with port and industrial traffic appear to have defeated this project. But I have a solution:

My name is Bob Fleming and I would like to see monorail utilized in Seattle-area rapid transit. I believe that in many situations monorail has distinct advantages over other means of transportation. My main interest is to build a modified version of the former Green Line project.

O.K., so I am a big fan of monorail, but we already have a light rail system expanding in Seattle, and even though I think monorail would have been better, I still want the light rail system to be as good as possible. One thing I am pushing for is to:

Seattle has one of the World’s
first modern monorails. It was built for the 1962 Seattle World’s
Fair, and still operates today as the The Seattle Center Monorail. It runs only a little over a mile from downtown Seattle to the Seattle Center, on the site of the former World’s Fair, but it is a very popular attraction and is a working example of a modern monorail. It demonstrates how monorail can be an alternative to subways or commuter railways for urban rapid transit.

In a city-wide election on 6 November 2002 the citizens of Seattle approved a new 14-mile long monorail to be built in Seattle. This line was named the Green Line, and would have been the first of several lines in a city-wide system of monorails. However, in the Summer of 2005 there were financing problems coupled with politics, and in an election on 8 November 2005, the majority of Seattle voters voted to cancel the monorail project.

The Current Situation

The Seattle Center Monorail is still operating and will probably continue to operate far into the future.

There was proposal in the November general election to build a monorail from Ballard to West Seattle via the Seattle Waterfront, however this measure was soundly defeated. This ballot issue is the result of an initative campaign by Century Transportation Authority (CTA or CenTran). For more information, click here.

In my opinion the cancelled monorail Green Line was an excellent project from the standpoint of design and importance as a key transportation system, but was shot down due to insufficient funding, some management errors, and politics. I believe it to still be the best solution for rapid mass transit in the western parts of Seattle. I believe there should be a new effort to build the Green Line .

For my ideas about possible new monorail projects in the Seattle area, please click here.

For my opinions about replacing the existing Seattle Center Monorail with a new, modern, and extended line, and for improvements to Key Arena, keeping the Sonics, and a new Monorail Museum, click here.

Click here to read my opinions about the Seattle Monorail Project and other Seattle-Area monorail plans. As for my opinions about the CTA plan, click here.

Seattle-area voters have approved a Sound Transit’s proposed ST3, a major expansion of light rail in the region.
Sound Transit is going ahead with Sound Transit 3 (ST3), a major project to extend light rail in the region. Part of the expansion will be light rail between Downtown Seattle and Ballard and also to West Seattle. I believe that monorail would be cheaper and better for these two routes, in fact the proposal roughly duplicates the Green Line monorail project that never quite got under way For details. click here.

Expedia Plans to Move from Bellevue to a Seattle Site Near the Green Line
The compamy plans to move its headquarters from Bellevue to a new location near Elliott Ave. W. and W. Galer St., at the south end of the Interbay district. One of the concerns is increased traffic in the area. The proposed Green Line monorail goes right past this location. So if the Green Line can be built it will provide rapid transit service to Expedia and expected development around the site. For details. click here.

Why not a a monorail linking Downtown, Seattle Center, and the Cruise Terminal? Click here for more!